Only solution to Kashmir lies in bilateral dialogue

Pakistan's call to have the United Nations probe the killing of two Indian soldiers on the Line of Control in Mendhar is disingenuous. The Pakistani foreign office cannot but be aware that after its bad experience with the UN Security Council (UNSC) in the 1947-1965 period, India has assiduously prevented the world body from poking its nose into the affairs of Jammu & Kashmir.

It is the manipulation of world powers, primarily the UK, which converted India's complaint of Pakistani aggression to the UNSC in 1948 into an "India-Pakistan" issue. So flawed were the resolutions passed by the world body that they proved to be unimplementable.

Following the 1972 Simla Agreement, New Delhi has argued that India and Pakistan are committed to resolving the issue bilaterally and there is no need for the world body to get involved in the process.

Activists burn a flag of Pakistan during a protest in Jammu on Friday

In line with this, it has permitted the United Nations Military Observers Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) to operate from India, but has refused to cooperate with it.

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Islamabad may be discovering the virtues of the UN now, but surely it has not forgotten that since 1990, it has been violating the LoC by sending in armed militants. Many of these have carried out terrorist acts on Indian soil, something that the UN Charter explicitly prohibits.

Pakistan feels that as the current chairman of the UNSC it would be able to bring J&K back on the agenda. But if past experience is a guide, it is not likely to get any support for such a move. Most of the countries in the world agree with India that the only solution to the Kashmir issue lies in bilateral dialogue.

Heat on tainted legislators

The Supreme Court's poser for the Union government on convicted politicians being allowed to continue as members of Parliament and state assemblies is a pertinent one. For, on the face of it, there does appear inconsistency between the provision of the Representation of People's Act (RPA) that allows sitting legislators convicted of a sentence extending beyond two years to continue on their post and the one that bars anyone convicted for the same period from contesting elections at all.

The court is right in wondering if Section 8(4) of RPA, which carves out an exception for sitting legislators, does not violate the fundamental right to equality guaranteed under Article 14 of the Constitution. Misgivings on this score are heightened when one considers that Article 102 of the Constitution, which deals with disqualification of parliamentarians, does not discriminate between a sitting MP and a person who wishes to contest elections for becoming one.

Over and above this legal issue is the larger one of the criminalisation of the polity that can only be addressed by the executive. Given that our tardy judicial system takes a long time to punish the guilty, the bar for disqualifying people from contesting elections needs to be lowered from conviction to framing of serious charges by a court, as the Law Commission and the Election Commission have recommended.

Indefensible tactics

The discovery of an improvised explosive device (IED) inside the bodies of some of the Central Reserve Police Force personnel killed in an ambush in Jharkhand reveals the extent to which Maoist guerillas are willing to take their battle with the security forces. The brutal tactic was only uncovered when doctors found a 2.5 kg unexploded bomb stitched into the abdomen of a constable whose body had been recovered.

This is hugely at odds with the Maoist movement's purported goal of fighting for the rights of people who were routinely brutalised, either physically or economically, by the apparatus of the Indian state. Such tactics also go to show how the ultras are constantly revising their strategies in their war against the security forces.

While the security forces must ensure their intelligence gathering prevents such novel tactics from leading to unpleasant surprises, a genuine effort from the state to counter such brutality with positive development could go much further at winning hearts and minds than a military response that is simply more powerful than the other side